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The last two decades have seen a great number of commissions, councils, and
political movements across the world aimed at reconciliation. The South African Truth
and Reconciliation Commission is the most famous example, but there have been similar
commissions in many countries following the fall of other tyrannical regimes. Projects
for reconciliation have also been launched in some areas still plagued by religious
conflict, such as Kashmir. This has spurned a new theoretical interest in the nature of
forgiveness and reconciliation, and the link between reconciliation and the age in which
we live, one in which so many countries have made the transition from despotism to
democracy. Jacques Derrida argues that we live in an time of reconciliation, and that this
was made possible only after events such as the Nuremberg trials and the universal
declaration of human rights created the category of “crimes against humanity.”
Reconciliation is linked to a growing sense of universalism about “humanity,” and
therefore also to the age of globalization. He writes:
Here is a humanity shaken by a movement which would like itself to be unanimous; here
is a human race that would claim to accuse itself, all at once, publicly and spectacularly,
of all the crimes committed in effect by itself against itself, ‘against humanity’ (Derrida
29).
Derrida believes the fervor for reconciliation arises because ours is the age of a humanity
that would like to speak as one, and as such must not only reconcile everyone to
everyone, but also must excise and forgive all the horrors of its past.
But what kind of reconciliation or forgiveness is this? Derrida argues that
forgiveness cannot be codified or set down through institutions; it is beyond all
calculation (Derrida 32-38). What use, he asks, would be a forgiveness that forgave only
the forgivable? We say something is forgivable when it is not serious. True forgiveness
forgives that which is not forgivable- that which no one can believe was forgiven. We can
Convention